{"id":28976,"date":"2015-10-15T17:16:56","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T22:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=28976"},"modified":"2015-10-16T00:29:35","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T05:29:35","slug":"knights-of-the-old-republic-ep20-the-christmas-sith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=28976","title":{"rendered":"Knights of the Old Republic EP20: The Christmas Sith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/X-uxFjPcsK8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=X-uxFjPcsK8'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>We killed the sexbot in the previous episode. This ignited a debate as to what the moral thing is in this case. The bot ran off. The bot is property. What&#8217;s the right thing to do?<\/p>\n<p>Clearly, Star Wars does not present droids an an oppressed underclass. The fact that they&#8217;re property is not social commentary and we&#8217;re not supposed to worry about their freedom. While I do nerdrage against George Lucas now and again, I&#8217;ve always given him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he&#8217;s NOT pro-slavery.<\/p>\n<p>To reconcile this apparent contradiction, I always assumed Star Wars droids didn&#8217;t <em>really<\/em> have feelings. This is entirely headcanon on my part, but I imagine that droids don&#8217;t really feel emotions. Their apparent emotions are to make them easier to deal with for their owners. If my protocol droid is worrying and stressed, I know it&#8217;s near capacity for whatever task I&#8217;ve given it, or that it&#8217;s at risk of failing at that task. It&#8217;s just a more advanced version of giving a friendly voice to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/ios\/siri\/\">Siri<\/a>. Siri isn&#8217;t alive and doesn&#8217;t actually care about me, but its creators gave it a friendly female voice because that&#8217;s nicer and more convenient than a dialog box.<\/p>\n<p>The movies contradict this notion, though. At one point you see one droid being&#8230; tortured? That&#8217;s too goofy a notion for me to wrap my head around, so I usually ignore it.<\/p>\n<p>But having a droid run away from its owner undercuts this idea of droids not having feelings. Clearly if a droid is going against the will of its owner you can&#8217;t argue that the &#8220;emotions&#8221; are just cosmetic. <\/p>\n<p>On the OTHER hand, if you pay attention to what the droid says, it&#8217;s clear the droid is actually trying to kill itself for the benefit of its master. It has concluded that she&#8217;s delusional, neurotic, crazy, or whatever. It&#8217;s destroying itself in hopes that she will move on. Presumably if she were better balanced the droid would be content to hang around and give her all the robo-sex she wanted?<\/p>\n<p>But who knows? Star Wars is actually much too pulpy to seriously tackle questions like this. The writer didn&#8217;t put droids in the story because they wanted to ask questions about consciousness, identity, free will, or the moral implications of creating a sapient designed to be your servant. They put droids in the story because robots are fun and different from people, and make the world more fantastical. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) We killed the sexbot in the previous episode. This ignited a debate as to what the moral thing is in this case. The bot ran off. The bot is property. What&#8217;s the right thing to do? Clearly, Star Wars does not present droids an an oppressed underclass. The fact that they&#8217;re property is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[84,513],"class_list":["post-28976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-bioware","tag-kotor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}